In my intermediate class of teenagers at the language school, the students and I were talking about cheating on tests, something that everyone does in their regular school, according to one of my students. She was the youngest in the class, a seventh-grader, and she was very forthright. Not so much bragging about cheating as bringing news to me, her obviously ill-informed teacher. I give very few tests myself, and the students’ grades on them count for very little, so cheating is not a worry. But in their high school, their grades can affect their future opportunities.
“You say everyone cheats?” I asked.
“Of course we cheat!” she said. “We all do!” Her three classmates agreed.
I looked at her. Round face, smooth hair, high cheek bones, sparkling eyes, happy grin. She wanted to shock me, and I was indeed taken aback. “Is that true?” I could have asked, but to throw in some new vocabulary, I used the word fact: “Is that a fact?”
“What’s a fact?” she asked.
Another student, a year older than the girl and the sharpest in the class, had an answer. “Factum,” he said.
“Oh.” The girl’s face was blank.
I stepped in. “Something that is certain, that has occurred and there is no disputing, in contrast to an opinion.”
“Oh,” the girl again replied. If she’d felt any sudden comprehension, it would have shown in her expression. Instead, I saw the wheels slowly turning.
“Un hecho?” she asked after a moment, and I nodded.
“Yes,” she confirmed, and then proceeded to describe her preferred method, which is to put her phone in her pencil case, face up, so that while pretending to search in the case for corrector fluid, she can quickly open the phone to a page with notes for the exam. But until she actually uses it, the phone just nestles there, like a baby in a crib. She even takes the precaution of making her screen saver a picture of pencils, so as to camouflage the phone. Even so, she is deathly afraid that her teacher will turn out the lights in the classroom, and the illuminated phone will glimmer in the darkened room, giving her away. “Does your teacher ever do that?” I asked. She said that the teacher never had, but she worried about it nonetheless.
I worried too. I thought of the gingerbread boy in the fairy tale, escaping his kindly old parents and then evading all the barnyard animals and the farmhands who try to restrain him. He thinks he is so clever. Eventually he meets a fox, who uses cunning to entrap the boy and eat him up. Was my student, like the boy, too pleased with herself for her own good? I also thought of daring and determined Jack, climbing the beanstalk to enter the giant’s castle, only to be given away when the harp he steals cries out to alert its master of the theft. Was my student’s phone like the giant’s harp, wanting to punish the wrongdoer? But no. Her phone would not want to betray her, I felt sure. She was too happy and energetic for anyone or anything to wish her harm. Trying to hurt her would be like striking at a playful breeze.
In a kindlier version of “The Gingerbread Boy,” the boy survives the encounter with the fox and hurries home, where his old mother and father tenderly enfold him in their arms. I looked at this girl, confessing her misdeeds to me with no trace of guile. I was not shocked after all. I was moved. I thought she was as delectable as cake. Anyone would think so. She might just be too good for her own good.
